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Saturday, May 05, 2012

Johnson the real winner once again

You can look at yesterday's local election results purely
in terms of the 400 or so council seats lost by the Conservatives and the
800-plus gained by Labour.

You can look at them in terms of national share of the vote,
with Labour opening up a seven-point lead over the Tories that if repeated in a
general election would put Ed Miliband comfortably in Number 10.

You can look at them in terms of the almost wholesale
rejection of the government's plans for a network of powerfully elected mayors
in our major cities, not least in Newcastle where the idea was rejected by a
majority of almost 2-1.

But whichever way you choose to look at them, it's
already pretty clear that Thursday was a very bad night for the Coalition.

It was always likely that the Tories would try to get us
to look at the results through the prism of their star performer Boris
Johnson's ultimately successful re-election campaign for the London Mayoralty.

But this really won't wash. Johnson is a political one-off, and so, in a
different sense, is his Labour opponent Ken Livingstone, who found himself
deserted in this election by a significant element within his own party.

Although in the short-term Mr Johnson's narrow win
provides the Conservatives with a convenient fig-leaf for their wider failure up
and down the land, in the longer-term his victory is a disaster for David
Cameron.

Once again, Boris has proved that he is the proven winner
in the Tory ranks, in marked contrast to a leader who couldn't even score an
outright election win against the exhausted volcano that was Gordon Brown in
2010.

In one sense yesterday's results were entirely
predictable given the catalogue of disasters that the government has visited
upon itself lately.

Mr Cameron will hope he can draw a line under it all in
time-honoured fashion, with a relaunch of the Coalition - or as some are calling
it, a renewal of vows – likely to come as early as the next fortnight.

This will be followed by a wide-ranging summer reshuffle
that could see Ken Clarke and Andrew Lansley thanked for their service and
replaced by younger, more media-savvy operators such as Grant Shapps and Chris
Grayling.

But even this poses difficulties for Mr Cameron, with the
long-planned promotion of Jeremy Hunt having to be put on hold pending his
appearance at the Leveson Inquiry into press standards.

For my part, I wonder whether something deeper than mere
mid-term blues is at work here - whether a public that was initially disposed
to give the Coalition the benefit of the doubt has now started to do the
opposite.

It is surely significant that, while 12 months ago the
Tory vote held up as the Lib Dems bore the brunt of voters' anger over the
austerity measures, this time round they were both punished equally.

Equally ominous for the Conservatives is the rise and
rise of the UK Independence Party, which took 13pc of the national vote in a
set of elections where it traditionally makes little impact.

If UKIP can start taking as many votes off the Conservatives
in a general election, it might even one day force them to embrace the merits
of proportional representation

Mr Miliband, though, will refuse to get carried away by
any of this.

Six months ago I thought the public had by and large made
up its mind about him, but maybe they are taking another look and liking what
they see.

The biggest encouragement for the Labour leader is the
fact that the party appears to be on the march beyond its traditional
strongholds.

Not only is it winning back bellweather Midlands cities
like Derby and Birmingham that will be crucial to its general election chances,
but also more southerly councils such as Harlow, Plymouth and Great Yarmouth.

As for the North-East, having rejected regional
government in 2004 it has now rejected the nearest thing to it, a Newcastle city
region led by a powerful, Boris-style elected mayor.

While I am no great fan of presidential-style politics,
it is hard to see how the region can compete effectively for its share of the
national cake without such powerful advocates.

Fear of change, the desire to stick to the devil you
know, remains a powerful factor in determining political outcomes, and
Thursday’s mayoral referendum was no exception.

And if there is a crumb of comfort anywhere for Mr
Cameron in yesterday’s results, it may well be in that.

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"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

"That's how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man's life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend."

Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."